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critiques were far more barbed. “The
sheer CLUELESSNESS of this event is mind
boggling,” Rumman Chowdhury, a data
scientist and an A.I. developer, tweeted.
“And I was just told that he workshopped
this talk at Esalen. If you know what that
is, that explains everything.”
In the lobby, I chatted with Tom
Coates, a co-founder of an A.I. startup.
These days, he said, before he tells a
stranger that he works in tech, “I gen-
erally try to say some version of ‘I wasn’t
one of the bad guys!’ ” He added, “That
should be printed on our nametags: name,
job title, which side of history you’re on.”
F
or all the talk of Esalen becoming
a beacon of moral guidance for the
tech élite, the institute’s public sched-
ule looks much as it did in the seven-
ties. There are workshops on a variety
of esoteric subjects (“Know Thy Selves:
Past Lives,” “Wild Eros in a Fragmented
World,” “SoulCollage”). After the piece
about Esalen ran in the Times, a new
C.E.O. was installed in Tauber’s place,
and Esalen’s leadership tried to reassure
its Aquarian customer base that their
beloved sanctuary would not be over-
run by tech bros. The institute’s pro-
motional photos feature a lot of gray
ponytails and very few Silicon Valley lu-
minaries. “With the most pathbreaking
stuff, you’re never gonna see it on the
Web site,” one Esalen insider told me.
“A lot of what they’re doing you’ll only
hear about years later, in history books.”
There’s some precedent for this. In
1980, Mike Murphy and his wife, Dulce,
established the Esalen Soviet-Ameri-
can Exchange Program. They facilitated
meetings between American astronauts
and Russian cosmonauts, and between
agents of the C.I.A. and the K.G.B.
Most of these meetings were conducted
in secret; many involved nature walks
and cross-cultural soaks in the hot
springs. (A Newsweek headline, in 1983,
referred to “Esalen’s Hot-Tub Diplo-
macy.”) In 1989, Boris Yeltsin, who had
recently resigned from the Politburo,
visited the United States on a nine-day
trip sponsored by Esalen. He met with
President George H. W. Bush, toured
the floor of the New York Stock Ex-
change, and stopped at a run-of-the-
mill supermarket on the outskirts of
Houston, where the abundant display
of pudding pops affected him so strong-
ly—“Even the Politburo doesn’t have
this choice! Not even Mr. Gorbachev!”—
that he vowed to dismantle Bolshevism
once and for all. “Esalen played its own
part in the collapse of Soviet Commu-
nism,” Jeffrey Kripal, a professor at Rice
University, wrote in his 2007 book, “Es-
alen: America and the Religion of No
Religion.” If hot-tub diplomacy could
help thaw the Cold War, surely it can
help diminish human downgrading.
Earlier this year, I scanned Esalen’s
course offerings. My past lives and my
wild eros seemed like things that I could
explore on my own time. Instead, I en-
rolled in a weekend-long workshop called
“Digital Detox: Unplug and Reimagine
Your Life.” The facilitators were Allie
Stark, Brooke Dean, and Adam (Smi-
ley) Poswolsky—all public speakers or
life coaches or some combination thereof,
all in their thirties. They were happy to
let me tag along but asked me to stay
undercover “just to maintain the con-
tainer of that space.” They would e-mail
the fifty participants ahead of time to
explain that there would be a journalist
in their midst, and then, at the end of
the weekend, they’d invite me to reveal
my identity. I made a halfhearted attempt
at subterfuge, packing a few items of
clothing that were not black or gray and
taking care not to bring along any New
Yorker-branded tote bags. When I walked
into the Friday-night opening session, I
looked down and noticed that I was car-
rying a WNYC tote bag instead. “So I
guess you’re the journalist,” a woman next
to me said, with a beneficent smile.
We sat in a circle in a large dome-
shaped tent. Outside was the ocean, in-
visible but shockingly loud. Dean led a
five-minute meditation. “Feeling your
body in this space,” she said. When it
was over, she asked, “O.K., how many
of you spent half that time wondering
whether that’s the sound of the ocean
or some kind of digital white-noise ma-
chine?” I raised my hand.
Poswolsky proposed a few ground
rules for the weekend. “But let’s call
them ‘agreements,’ ” he said. “‘Rules’
sounds so boring.” He uncapped a
marker and stood next to an easel pad.
“When we talk about building a health-
ier relationship with our phones, we
often talk about it in negatives—no
screens after 10 P.M., that sort of thing,”
he said. “When we say no to digital
technology, what are we saying yes to?”
“Openness.”
“Vulnerability.”
“Being courageous.”
“Being vulnerageous.”
“Vulnerageous!” Poswolsky said. “I
love that!”
The main rule (sorry, agreement) was,
of course, a phone ban. This was rela-
tively easy to adhere to, because Esalen is
so remote that it’s impossible to get cell
reception. The facilitators also imposed
some conversational content moderation:
we were asked to avoid “W-talk,” “W”
being short for “work.” “When you meet
someone, let’s not start with ‘What do
you do?’ ” Dean said. “Maybe start with
‘What makes you feel most alive?’” Real
names were discouraged. People adopted
nicknames for the weekend: Down, Pen-
ultimate, Emo Biscotti. (In 2016, Tristan
Harris attended a Digital Detox event, as
reported in The Atlantic. During a con-
versation about digital sabbaticals, Har-
ris protested, “For me, this is W-talk.”)
We returned to the lodge for din-
ner—college-co-op-style pad Thai, an
artisanal peanut-butter-and-jelly sta-
tion, and a condiment table featuring
several varieties of nutritional yeast. After
dinner, most of the group proceeded to-
ward the hot tubs. I did, too, navigat-
ing by following the sulfur smell. The
tubs had been billed as “clothing op-
tional,” but I was the only person who’d
even bothered to bring a bathing suit,
much less put one on.
The next morning, back in the dome
tent, the facilitators debriefed us on our
first few hours of phonelessness: “Any-
one having any withdrawal symptoms?”
They’d brought along a few co-facilita-
tors to lead workshops—“except we call
them playshops,” Stark said. Zev would
organize a face-painting playshop. Ian
would lead a hike to a waterfall. Ramesh
Srinivasan, a U.C.L.A. professor, intro-
duced himself: “My research is focussed
on how technology impacts the world.”
“No W-talk!”
“Oh, right,” he said. “My workshop
will be on—”
“Playshop!”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll be talking about
how a lot of the power of technology
has been distributed unequally, and how
marginalized communities are trying to
develop innovative responses to that.
But I’ll try to keep it playful.”
